Page 67 of Thaddeus

“Escape routes. All of the properties I’ve examined all have multiple ways in and out,” he explained. “I’ll dig in further, see if I can maneuver a drone to fly over and if I can’t, God knows Tex will find a way. One day, I’m gonna lock his ass in a room and not let him out until he teaches me his Jedi Master ways.”

“Good luck with that, friend. One leg or not, Tex can still kick your ass.” Declan chuckled.

“You’re probably right,” Garrett grumbled.

“No ‘probably’ about it. Listen, we appreciate all your hard work on this,” Declan told him.

“Anytime. Out.”

“When you went through the hotel room in Venezuela, did you find Jefferson’s laptop or tablet?” I asked.

“Negative,” Max answered.

“What did you find?”

“His suitcase was packed with his clothes, a matchbook in one of the pockets, cufflinks—”

“Cufflinks?” I cut Thaddeus off.

“Yeah.”

“Did they have a falcon on them?”

“Damn,” Thad murmured. “They do have a bird on them.”

“They were a gift from a man named Emilio Ruiz. He’s—”

“Fuck,” Declan cut me off. “We know who he is. His daughter was almost kidnapped while on vacation.”

“Jefferson hated him. Hated he had more money than him. Hated that that money garnered Emilio more respect. He’d droned on and on about how Emilio had to be taken down a peg. We went to a birthday party—well, it was more like the largest celebration I’d ever been to, think Presidential inauguration. Anyway, the party was at Emilio’s home in Guadalajara. The entire night Jefferson was pissed and most of that night was spent with Jefferson staring at the daughter, Antonia. I was actually worried Jefferson was getting ready to kick me to the curb so he could try and seduce his rival’s daughter. Which I could totally picture Jefferson doing.”

“Garcia wasn’t planning seduction, he was plotting the poor girl’s demise,” Tatiana said. “Seems there is no honor among the Omni.”

“What’s Omni? You keep talking about it but I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s an international group of the power elite,” Declan started. “The government has known about them for a long time but the issue has always been their membership is a closely guarded secret. A while back, Tex Keegan was able to get us intel on them after they’d taken down Marine One and had kidnapped the president, Tex’s intel was confirmed that Omni members held positions of power in our government.”

“The president was kidnapped? I didn’t hear about that.”

I might’ve been out of the U.S. as I spent a lot of time traveling the world, but something like that would’ve made international headlines.

“You wouldn’t’ve. Let’s just say, President Anderson is one of the smartest men I know, and he’d planned for the kidnapping and had left strict instructions on who was to be brought in on the rescue mission. As far as the media knew, there was a training accident. Though he did publicly out several top members of his cabinet as traitors.”

“Holy hell. And Jefferson was a member of this group? You’re sure?”

Jefferson had money. He considered himself the “power elite” but that was because he’d been a pompous prick. I had no idea he’d had the clout to be involved in an organization that would have the resources to kidnap the President of the United States.

“He was. And the trademark peacock feather tattoo confirmed it.”

“So, I take it you’re looking for this Omni group?” I concluded.

“One scumbag at a time,” Declan confirmed. “We need to dismantle the organization.”

“Wow.”

For some reason, Thad’s role in this disassembly hit me. I knew he’d been a SEAL, I’d known the dangers that followed. I’d seen him dressed in head-to-toe black armed to the teeth four times now so I knew his current job was still dangerous. He’d killed a seriously bad guy in front of me, rescued a group of young girls from a shack before they could be transported. Killed more men who guarded a bad man and his seriously fucked-up income source, and attempted to free more women. Declan’s throat had been cut and no one seemed to make a big deal of that—it was just another day at the office. I knew Thaddeus and the guys worked for a man named Zane Lewis, but I had no idea who that was. And to top all of that off, the guys were going after a group of people that wouldn’t want their empires dismantled.

Thad’s job wasn’t dangerous, it was fucking insanely dangerous.